This plugin hasnt been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

trick and, while it did save new uploads to the desired folder, images/thumbs were not available, because in media library the new path was concatenated onto the original path — the new path as shown was wrong anyway (slashes got removed), so it wouldn’t have worked regardless.

I also tried a different plugin to change/hide URLs and protect the wp site from anonymous direct access to files, which means it allowed for changing default paths. That didn’t work, but this simple one does.